Guia Besana

In the last 35 years biodiversity has declined by more than a quarter due to population growth and our consumption. Overexploitation is currently unsustainable and habitat destruction is causing decrease in species. Adding to the complexity of this problem is climate change.

This is a fact and it is also a fact that this current situation in one for which one species – ours – appears to be responsible.

Performed by feminine figures, POISON illustrates with a series of images the journey of my mind entering and exiting some of the themes, which represent this concern. In solitary whereabouts these women find themselves inside scenes of accomplished destruction and corruption or candidly define the inevitable consequence.

Addressing environmental issues in their diversity is not an easy task, taken the scale of the topic. One might take for granted the global awareness regarding the destruction of biodiversity as a consequence of human activities, yet, in our daily lives, we all have to face situations that leave us powerless, or which we choose to ignore. This very feeling of helplessness is the starting point of my series “Poison”, born from my need to give a form to the questionings we all have to deal with, day after day.

For my previous series, I used feminine figures to embody emotions linked to maternity and femininity. I quite naturally kept the same process for my new work dedicated to the problem of environment destruction. Of course because I'm a woman, and I can identify directly to these figures, but also because women, as they give life, offer a more striking contrast with the destruction scenes I depict in my pictures. With these very precise compositions, complex enough to raise different ideas, I allow different interpretations. This involvement of the viewer is essential to me, as it initiates a personal reflexion, making way to a deeper questioning of our behavior towards the emergency of environmental issues.

Through a suite of 10 large-scale photographs Under Pressure illustrates women playing endless parts in our unstable society which persistently solicits us with contradictory messages. Women are directed to represent or translate, into a mise-en-scène, a specific conflicting theme: burn-out, marriage, ideal love, search for happiness, relationship with its own body, technology …

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures" Ralph Waldo Emerson

Subjects dealing with women identity have always drawn my attention. Treating themes I relate to make it possible for me to go unintentionally in depth. Becoming a mother and facing new emotions led me to a different kind of visual narration to describe what is true and I thought that illustrating the complex experience of pregnancy and motherhood was worth to be translated into a photographic work.

This series, titled “Baby Blues”, explores the emotional and fragile world women encounter during motherhood through a process of staging and symbolic representation of truth.  It might sound like a paradox but I believe that constructing an image from an inner vision can be as honest as recording it from real life. It is another way of showing something others can relate to, respecting a distance but demanding questioning.

I began using a large format camera to stage and recreate images where the subject is a mother in a very specific state of mind seizing the tension between what seems like an obvious circumstance and a deeper implication. The purpose of this series is to preserve the emotional experience that becoming a mother entails.

In “Baby Blues” women are like frozen in a different time, far from what is happening around them, they look as if they were forgotten in a scene. These representations of female introspection are contemporary portraits resulting from themes such as fear, loss, identity, isolation, fusion and separation from one’s children and fleeting childhood memory that recurs...

The Ladybug Series 

The Ladybug Series was born from the desire to pay tribute to my own experience of growing up. Inspired by the birth of my little daughter, watching her grow from a newborn to a toddler, I view the little girl I was from a different perspective. 

The girls in the Ladybug Series were asked to wear their chosen “special” dress, so that they could express their uniqueness and individuality. Within their imperfection and spontaneity lies their charm and innocence. 

 I am interested in this consistency which confirms the influence that archetypes have in our early years of life making this series an investigation in that substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge.

Interview in Istanbul - 2006

"Interview in Istanbul" is a portrait of women from different Istanbul areas each representing a different social status, religion, age and education. All women in this portrait series are living in Istanbul and were interviewed.

The project aims to give voice to Turkish women. Among the subjects, three business women, a known lawyer for Women’s Human Rights, a woman from the Russian Orthodox community and a well known transexual who struggled to legalize transexuals in Turkey and who is still leading a battle for gay rights.

The relationship between mind and technology is very much discussed in contemporary society. Many are the new technologies substituting and solving mind processes and daily life customs leaving our future evolution as human beings questionable and unpredictable. This photo essay is a series of portraits of American families, in Los Angeles, playing with a game, bringing sports and other activities in the living room, still in a very simplified way. The portraits were taken during sessions where the Wii was being tested for the first time by selected families.

An AIDS epidemic on a scale unknown anywhere else in the world is devastating Swaziland. 

Figures released that 42.6 per cent of the adult population is infected with either HIV or AIDS. For Swazis aged between 25 and 29, the figure is 56 per cent. No other country has infection rates as high as this. With a population of one million, the very survival of the nation is at stake. Across the region, Aids has reduced life expectancy to levels not seen since the 1800’s. Prostitution and child abuse are booming, traditions are lost, hoseholds left to decadence, roofs collapse in what was once the central fire spot that kept the family warm and united. To disclose that they are dying of the epidemic is a shame and all they can tell is they die from “the long illness”.  Tradition, such as poligamy, makes Swazi society uniquely vulnerable.

Incessant cough is killing, rural areas evoke emtyness, abandoned villages exude presence of human beings who passed away from AIDS, graves grow like bushes in the dry landscape. Crops and cotton fields are left unheld.

With theirsignificant endurance, an army of orphans is left to fight against extinction on a territory where death of population, villages that disappear and voices that no longer convey the history of their families result ina broken landscape. 

She 2003

Born in 1942 Laura went through surgery in 1963.
Laura was the first man in Italy to undergo surgery in order to become a woman.
I listened to her story trying to fix gestures that could well represent her strong personality. 
I discovered an elegant woman, an excellent cook, a wise and creative friend.
All the objects surrounding her tell a story of profound sensibility.
My desire was to bring alive this project through images representing my personal vision of her, her disguises, of fiction and non fiction, showing a fragment of her soul.

I arrived in Teheran on January 2004. My interest was life inside households.

It happens frequently, when departing for a journey with a camera, accompanied by the inside personal experience, that the photographic essay directs towards a subconscious vision.

The subtle undertones of the complex Iranian social structure was strongly influencing me. Equivocal messages and unordinary reactions inspired me.

My eyes and my feelings took notes for a photographic essay.  My vision in the intimacy of places and interior of houses as the space favored for stories regarding women, where objects seem to be suspended in time awaiting for changements, enchanted me.

An ambiguous relation between “inside” and “outside”, at times confounding and contradictory is what I translate in “Inside Teheran”.